“Sound the gas alarm!”
“Colonel?”
Peiper shoved the officer aside and ran for the alarm control panel himself. He chopped down at the right button and then whirled to find his own chemical gear.
The wailing rise and fall of Pelindaba’s air raid sirens faded-replaced instantly by the high-pitched warbling of its poison gas alert.
In wooden barracks buildings all around the compound, several hundred newly wakened South African soldiers who’d been grabbing rifles and helmets dropped them and started fumbling for gas masks, gauntlets, and chemical protection suits instead. Two or three extra minutes would pass before they could hope to join the bloody battle now raging throughout the camp perimeter.
Col. Frans Peiper had just given the U. S . Rangers the time they so desperately needed.
HEADQUARTERS COMPANY, 1/75TH RANGERS
O’Connell crouched just below the lip of the slit trench and stared at the wide-eyed, panting men clustered around him. More of his headquarters troops and officers had survived the landing then he’d first thought possible. Even Professor Levi had come through unwounded, although the
Israeli scientist now sat huddled on the trench floor, nursing an ankle he’d sprained on impact.
“Weisman!”
His radioman pushed through the crowd. O’Connell took the handset he offered.
“Sierra One Zero, this is Rover One One. Atlas. I say again,
Atlas.” The MC-141 still orbiting somewhere overhead would relay the news that the Rangers were on the ground and attacking. And men waiting in the
Pentagon and the White House could push new pins in their maps.
He passed the handset back and stood listening to the noise of the battle. M 16s, M60 machine guns, and squad automatic weapons were being fired in greater numbers, their distinctive crackle and chatter beginning to blend with the heavier sounds made by South African rifles and machine guns. The Rangers were starting to fight back.
RADAR CONTROL VEHICLE, CACTUS SAM BATTERY, PELINDABA
Panicked by the gas alert siren, the lone corporal manning the Cactus battery’s jammed and useless fire-control radar tore his headphones off and scrambled out of his chair. He’d left his chemical suit back in the barracks. He moved toward the vehicle’s rear hatch.
It clanged open before he got there, and the South African stared in surprise at the figure outlined against the night sky. Odd, that didn’t look like any uniform he’d ever seen before….
Three M16 rounds threw the radar operator back against his equipment in a spray of blood and torn flesh.
Outside the hatch, the Ranger sergeant lowered his rifle and pulled the pin on a fragmentation grenade. He tossed the grenade in on top of the dead man and then slammed the hatch shut.
Whummp! The Cactus battery command vehicle rocked slightly and then sat silent-its delicate electronics smashed by bullets and grenade fragments.
The radar dish on top stopped spinning.
Bent low, the sergeant sprinted across a stretch of open lawn near
Pelindaba’s main science lab. Rifle rounds whip cracked over his head-fired at long range from a bunker on the compound’s northern perimeter. He dove for cover behind a row of young saplings planted as shade trees. Leaves clipped off by stray bullets drifted down on the five men waiting there for him. Two carried a Carl Gustav M3 84mm recoilless rifle.
“You get ‘em?”
” Yep. ” The Carl Gustav gunner patted his weapon affectionately.
“Hammered ‘em real good.”
The sergeant lifted his head an inch or two, risking a quick look. The three Cactus SAM launch vehicles were cloaked in flame and smoke. As he watched, one of the burning launchers blew up in a blinding flash of orange light. Must’ve been a missile cook-off, the sergeant thought.
Time to report in. He squirmed around and found his radioman.
“Rover One
One, this is Bravo Two Four. Diablo One, Two, Three, and Diablo Dish are history.”
Pelindaba’s air defenses were down.
B COMPANY BARRACKS, 61 ST TRANSVAAL RIFLES
The red, flickering glow of burning buildings and vehicles dimly lit a scene of mass confusion inside the barracks building Half-dressed South African soldiers scrambled frantically to put on protective gear they’d only been issued the day before. Others, faster or better trained, were already suited up and trying to ready their weapons with clumsy, gloved hands. Lieutenants and sergeants roved through the crowd, trying to sort their squads and platoons into some sort of order before leading them outside and into battle.
Captain van Daalen, the battalion adjutant, felt more like a spaceman than a soldier in his chemical protection suit. The suit itself was hot and difficult to move in, and the gas mask limited both his vision and his hearing. He scowled. Going into combat while practically deaf and blind didn’t strike him as a particularly sane act, but the thought of nerve gas made him check the seals.
He crouched by an open window, trying to spot a reasonably safe route to the battalion command bunker. He wasn’t having much luck. The bunker lay more than two hundred and fifty meters away across a flat, open field.
Perhaps it would be more sensible to carry out his duties from the barracks, van Daalen thought. After all, there wasn’t much point in dying in a quixotic and suicidal dash through machinegun fire.
Movement outside caught his eye. Soldiers, silhouetted against a burning
SAM launcher, were fanning out into a long line less than fifty meters away. As each man reached his place, he dropped prone facing the barracks.
Van Daalen rose. That was damned strange. It was almost as though those troops were planning to attack…
“Let the bastards have it! Fire! Fire! Fire!” The shout from outside echoed above the staccato rattle of gunfire and the crash of explosions all across Pelindaba.
Van Daalen froze in horror. That shout had been in English, not
Afrikaans. He started to turn…
Half a dozen rockets lanced out from the line of enemy troops, tore through thin wood walls, and exploded inside spraying fragments and wood splinters through the tightly packed South African soldiers. Machinegun and M16 fire scythed into the building right behind the rockets, punching through from end to end. Dead or wounded men were thrown
everywhere-tossed across bloodstained bunks or knocked into writhing heaps on top of one another.
Capt. Edouard van Daalen clutched at the jagged edges of what had once been a window frame in a vain effort to stay standing. Then his knees buckled and he slid slowly to the floor, pawing feebly at the row of ragged, wet holes torn in his chemical protection suit.
The Americans outside kept shooting.
HEADQUARTERS COMPANY, 1/75TH RANGERS
Lt. Col. Robert O’Connell listened with growing satisfaction to the reports flooding in from units around the compound. The enemy’s Cactus SAM battery permanently out of action. Barracks after barracks reported on fire or collapsed by salvos of light antitank rockets, HE rounds from recoilless rifles, and concentrated small-arms fire. A 120mm mortar position overrun at bayonet point by survivors from Bravo Company’s I st
Platoon. Brave Fortune was finally starting to go according to plan.
But the battalion’s casualties were heavy and growing heavier with every passing minute. Colonel Gener hadn’t been seen since the jump. Three of eight platoon leaders were down. He didn’t even want to guess how many noncoms and other Rangers lay dead in Pelindaba’s barbed wire, rock gardens, buildings, and open fields.
He ducked as a grenade burst close by, showering dirt and fragments across the open lip of the slit trench. A Ranger beside him screamed and fell back in a tangle of thrashing arms and legs. Blood spattered across
O’Connell’s face. Other soldiers were already up and shooting back-pumping rounds into the flame-lit darkness.